Student sportswriter recognized with national award

Journalism major Sarah Moomaw is one of four student sportswriters to earn an Associated Press Sports Editors Scholarship this summer. Photo by Christopher Huang.

Sarah Moomaw didn’t plan to be a sports jour­nalist. But pretty much everyone else knew she was des­tined to be one.

“I didn’t come to North­eastern under the assump­tion I would be a sports reporter,” said Moomaw, a senior jour­nalism major. “I didn’t have dreams since I was a little kid to be a sports­writer, which is the case with so many others who do this.”

Moomaw intended to be an arts and lifestyle reporter. But sports had long dom­i­nated the Saint Louis native’s life, so much so that she has made her family eat vaca­tion din­ners at sports bars so she could watch her beloved Car­di­nals play base­ball. Even the sto­ries she wrote while on co-​​op with The Boston Globe tended to focus on sports.

“People kept saying, ‘Are you sure you don’t want to cover sports?’” Moomaw said. “And more than any­thing I heard at North­eastern, people kept saying ‘You really need to talk to Chuck.’”

Moomaw heeded this advice, enrolling in the sports writing class taught by jour­nalism pro­fessor Charles Foun­tain. She also started working part-​​time on nights and week­ends as a “hawk” at the Globe’s sports desk, col­lecting box scores and cov­ering games for the print edi­tion and the paper’s website.

And last spring Moomaw became the sports editor for The Hunt­ington News, the inde­pen­dent stu­dent news­paper that covers the uni­ver­sity. She will resume the role this fall, over­seeing a team that writes, edits and designs the sports pages for the publication’s weekly print edition.

Moomaw found out that she was one of four stu­dents nation­wide to earn the Asso­ci­ated Press Sports Edi­tors Schol­ar­ship while she was in Argentina this summer on a Dia­logue of Civ­i­liza­tions pro­gram. The schol­ar­ships — awarded to help moti­vate tal­ented stu­dents to pursue a career in sports jour­nalism — were announced in a news release written by Boston Globe sports editor Joe Sul­livan, who noted the four schol­ar­ship recip­i­ents were part of “the best group of writers who ever applied.”

“The win­ners are an out­standing four­some who all have a big future in our busi­ness,” wrote Sul­livan, who is Moomaw’s editor at the Globe.

Ear­lier this year, he assigned her the all-​​important task of com­piling a daily “this date in Fenway Park his­tory” fea­ture, a spot that ran online and in print to mark the sto­ried ballpark’s 100th anniversary.

The work was gru­eling, Moomaw said, noting the need to pore over decades of archived sto­ries and box scores to find a his­toric event from each day — a dif­fi­cult task even for a park as old and beloved as Fenway.

“The first month was really fun, the next six were really painful, and I still have about two weeks left to do,” Moomaw said.

Though she never intended to be a sports­writer, Moomaw now knows that she has found the per­fect career. “A lot of my writers at the Hunt­ington News have had dreams of doing this since they were little kids,” she said. “That wasn’t the case for me, but I know it’s exactly what I’m sup­posed to be doing.”

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